Richard Morgan - The Steel Remains

“That won’t have helped,” Ringil agreed quietly.

She heard the damage in his voice.

The heads were too much for most of them. The few Throne Eternal survivors of the Beksanara encounter, the war-hardened levy reinforcements from Khartaghnal or the Ennishmin scavenger toughs hired to guide them, even Egar, it made no real difference. Men stumbled away, sick-faced and shaking, after the few seconds it took to understand what they’d walked into. For quite a while, the stillness of the swamp was salted with the repeated sounds of Archeth’s forces retching.

Ringil just stood immobile and looked on.

“Risgillen” was all he said.

It wasn’t the ring of failed escapees beyond the fence that he’d described, not anymore. The dwenda had pulled out and whether for warning, ritual, or revenge, they had left nothing in their wake to be salvaged. The stable-type housing had been reduced by some process no one readily understood to a scattering of wet gray mulch, and out across the pools and soggy ground of the swamp, there were more than a hundred living heads, a more or less evenly sown crop, all carefully supplied with the depth of water that apparently served to keep them conscious.

While Archeth’s men braced themselves against fallen trees or boulders, and trembled and cursed or wept as was their inclination, Ringil went quietly about, lifting each head from the water and placing it gently on raised ground, where the roots of the sorcerous trunks could not get sustenance. Behind the thick swatches of bandage masking his face, it was hard to know what his expression might have been. He grimaced occasionally, but that might have been the pain in his injured arm.

After a while, some of the other men regained enough self-possession to help.

When the heads were dry enough that life seemed to have left them, when the eyes had closed and the tears dried, and when they’d scoured the vicinity to be sure that there was not one single fucking possibility they’d missed any, Archeth drew axmen from the levy and had them split each skull apart.

That took quite awhile.

When it was done, they gathered what dry fuel they could find and built a pyre, then seeded it with some of the new oily wax cakes the levy carried for starting campfires. Archeth lit the pile and they all stood in silence for the time it took to catch. At Ringil’s insistence, they pitched a camp down by the creek and waited for the pyre to burn down. Archeth found tasks to keep her men busy, but still the acrid smell drifted through the winter trees and found them, and men stopped what they were doing and swallowed hard or spat when they caught the scent.

Later that afternoon, Archeth missed Ringil and, following a not particularly inspired hunch, tracked him back to the pyre. By then, it had burned down to embers and bone fragments and ash. He stood in front of it in rigid silence, but when her foot cracked a rotten tree branch behind him, he whipped about with inhuman speed.

That was when she saw it for the first time—the thing in his eyes that still chilled her now.

“Always something worse,” he’d murmured when she moved closer.

“Perhaps they don’t just fall down like men, perhaps they are men. Or they were once.”

She stood beside him and watched the ashes smoke. She put a hand on his arm, and he turned to look at her, and for just a moment it was as if she was a total stranger touching him.

Then, abruptly, he smiled, and it was the Ringil she remembered.

“Do you think they’ll be back?” she asked him.

He was quiet for a while, so quiet she thought he hadn’t heard. She was about to ask again when he spoke.

“I don’t know. Maybe we scared them away, yeah.”

“ We can stop them, ” she quoted his own words back at him. “ We can send them back to the gray places to think again about taking this world. ”

The smile came back, faint and crooked. “Yeah. What idiot said that? Sounds kind of pompous, doesn’t it?”

“Even idiots get it right sometimes.”

“Yeah.” But she could see that somewhere inside he didn’t really believe it enough to dwell on. He turned instead and gestured at the great black buried spike of the Kiriath weapon. “Anyway, look at that fucking thing. It murdered an entire city, and turned what was left into swamp. If that won’t scare you off, what will?”

“Scares me,” she agreed.

It did, but not for the reasons she let him assume.

When they finally found the place—and even with the scavenger guides and Ringil’s help, it took longer than you’d expect—most of the humans in the party could not see the black iron spike any better than the Aldrain bridge that led to it. She didn’t know whether that was the dwenda’s doing, some cloaking glamour to keep the scavengers away, or if it was something her own people had done when they built and unleashed the weapon in the first place. She saw it clearly enough, and so did Ringil. Some others could manage it for a few seconds at a time, if they stayed and stared and squinted for long enough, which most did not care to do. The majority claimed to see only an impenetrable mass of dead mangrove, a tangle of poisonous-colored vegetation, or simply an empty space that every instinct screamed at them not to approach.

“This is an evil place,” she heard one grizzled levy corporal mutter.

That was one way to look at it, and another helpful corollary was that the evil came from the dwenda presence here, either the once-long-ago mythical city or the more recent incursion. But Archeth could not help, could not stop herself from wondering, if that sensation of evil came from the weapon itself; if there was not some smoldering remnant of its awful power still buried at the tip and if that was what came rising from the surrounding swamp like some ancient phantom in black rotting robes.

She had for so long been confident of Kiriath civilization, of a moral superiority that lifted her and her whole people above the brutal morass of the human world. Now she thought back to some of Grashgal’s and her father’s more brooding moments, their less intelligible meditations on the past and the essence of who they were, and she wondered if they had lived with this knowledge, of weapons to murder entire cities, and had hidden it from her, out of shame.

These fucking humans, Archidi, Grashgal had told her, and shuddered. If we stay, they’re going to drag us into every squalid fucking skirmish and border dispute their short-term greed and fear can invent. They’re going to turn us into something we never used to be.

But what if, Archidi, that wasn’t the truth of the revulsion in his voice at all. What if the truth of Grashgal’s fears was that these fucking humans are going to turn us back into something we haven’t been for a long, long time.

She didn’t want to think about it. She buried it in the day-to-day tasks of the clear-up, the creation of the new garrisons at Beksanara and Pranderghal and half a dozen other strategically placed villages around the swamp. If the dwenda were coming back, it was her job to ensure that the Empire was equipped to repel them with massive force. For the moment, nothing else need matter.

But for all that, the knowledge would not go away.

Even here and now, in the sun and the garden at Pranderghal, the great black iron spike stayed buried in the back of her mind just the way it was buried in the swamp, and she knew she’d never get rid of it. Knew, abruptly, looking at Ringil’s slowly healing face and the stitched wound that would inevitably leave a scar, that he was not the only one the dwenda encounter had damaged for good.

He caught her watching him and gave her a grin, one of the old ones.